Lev Nussberg (Russian, born Uzbekistan, b. 1937)
and Natalia Prokuratova (Russian, b. 1948)
Altar for the Temple of the Spirit (Sketch for the Creation of an Altar at the Institute of Kinetics), 1969-1970, Tempera and photocollage on paper, 24 5/16 x 34 in.
Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, 2003.0154/25274
Photo by Jack Abraham

Bruce Museum’s provocative new exhibition Hot Art in a Cold War: Intersections of Art and Science in the Soviet Era examines one of the dominant concerns of Soviet unofficial artists—and citizens everywhere—during the Cold War: the consequences of innovation in science, technology, mathematics, communications, and design. Juxtaposing art made in opposition to state-sanctioned Socialist Realism with artifacts from the Soviet nuclear and space programs, Hot Art in a Cold War touches upon the triumphs and tragedies unleashed as humankind gained the power to both leave the Earth and to destroy it.

Produced from the 1960s to the 1980s, the works on view address themes of international significance during a turbulent period marked by the ever-escalating competition for nuclear supremacy and the space race. Creative interpretations of these key historical events and their repercussions are presented here through nearly 40 works by 17 artists from the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia.

The Hot Art in a Cold War exhibition, which continues through May 20, explores the anxious realities and utopian fantasies of everyday Soviet life in the second half of the twentieth century through a variety of media, from documentary photographs and surrealist abstractions to hyperrealist paintings and kinetic sculptures. Kinetic artists in Russia and Latvia directly synthesized art and science in their works, often forming groups to collectively envision and even build immersive installations that offered viewers glimpses into unknown futures.

As science became a proxy battlefield for the struggle between the USSR and the United States, the Soviet space program achieved a long string of successes, including launching the first artificial satellite, first animal, first human, and first space station into orbit. This exhibition features artifacts representing these breakthroughs, including an unlaunched backup of Sputnik, a replica of the spacesuit worn by the first space dog Laika, and equipment from the Salyut space station program. The darker side of this Cold War competition is seen in examples of nuclear fallout equipment and specimens from Chernobyl.

“The Bruce Museum prides itself in being a museum of both art and science and in finding the interconnections between the two,” says Dr. Daniel Ksepka, Bruce Museum Curator of Science and co-curator of the exhibition. “Hot Art in a Cold War is a perfect example of this unique focus. Visitors will see how the triumphs of the space program and anxieties about nuclear arms were captured by period artists. Likewise, many of the scientific objects are works of art in their own right. The elegance of Sputnik, for example, is as striking and undeniable as its impact on the space race.”

“This exhibition is very timely, as we see history repeating itself in the connection between the ‘official’ behaviors of the Cold War and today’s ongoing wars and political conflicts, not to mention the ever-increasing role that technology plays in our everyday lives,” adds Ksenia Nouril, exhibition co-curator.

Hot Art in a Cold War is an expanded version of an exhibition organized at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., by Ksenia Nouril, Dodge Fellow, Zimmerli Art Museum and PhD Candidate, Department of Art History at Rutgers. The exhibition at the Zimmerli and Ms. Nouril’s fellowship have been supported by the Avenir Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

“While the exhibition focuses on two main events of the Cold War—the nuclear arms and space races—museumgoers could place it within the context of a number of other related historical flash points, from the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to tearing it down in 1989, the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989), and the current crises in eastern Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere,” Nouril explains.

A majority of the artworks on loan are from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, which is housed at the Zimmerli Art Museum. The late Norton Dodge (1927-2011), an American economist, began collecting Soviet unofficial art during the Cold War, making several trips to the Soviet Union starting in 1955. He amassed one of the largest collections of this kind of art in the world.

Approximately 20,000 works from his collection were transferred to the Zimmelri in the 1990s. In this way, the Dodge Collection is very much a product of the Cold War, which pitted American capitalism against Soviet communism. Certain artworks in this exhibition, such as Aleksandr Zhitomirsky’s Ferocious Appetite (1969), focus on this fierce competition between these two nations. Other works, such as Valdis Celms’ Positron (1976) and Francisco Infante-Aranas’ Spirals, reveal the extent to which Soviet nonconformist artists were also inspired by the advancements in science that fueled military-industrial complexes on both sides of the Atlantic. As unofficial artists who were not sanctioned by the state, they playfully and ironically depicted the positives and negatives of the effects of science, technology, and telecommunications in their works, such as Erik Bulatov’s The Soviet Cosmos (1977).

Although advancements in nuclear energy and space exploration gave great hope, they also came at a steep price, taking their toll on the Soviet economy, environment, and quality of life. Unofficial artists communicated their desires and fears by reimagining their earthly environments and conjuring unexplored worlds. Hot Art in a Cold War captures the direct and indirect intersections between art and science during this historically significant period of geopolitical tension that remains relevant today.

For support of this exhibition, the Bruce Museum thanks the Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund; the Connecticut Office of the Arts; a Committee of Honor, chaired by Jacqueline and Arthur Walker and Deborah and Alan Simon; and media sponsor WSHU Public Radio Group.

Related Programs:
Sundays, February 11, 25, 1:00 – 3:00 pm.
Science Sundays. A drop-in program designed for children ages 4 and up and their families. Participants will explore simple science concepts and subjects while partaking in fun, kid-friendly experiments, projects and crafts inspired by the Museum’s collections and exhibitions. Free with admission and no advance registration is required.
February 11: Space Race Rocket Building;
February 25: Patriotic Plane Design.

Tuesday, February 13, 6:30 – 8:00 pm.
Science Lecture. Out of the Secret World: Cosmic Visions in the Soviet Imagination. Dr. Asif Siddiqi, space historian and professor at Fordham University, specializes in the history of science and technology and modern Russian history. He has written several books on the history of space exploration. Reception at 6:30 pm; talk 7:00 – 8:00 pm. Admission in advance: Free for Bruce members and students (with valid ID), $15 for nonmembers. At the door: $10 members, $25 nonmembers. Reservations at brucemuseum.org/site/events.

Tuesday, February 27, 6:30 – 8:00 pm.
Evening Lecture. Building Dreamworlds, Facing Catastrophes: Art, Science and the Cold War, by Ksenia Nouril, Dodge Fellow, Zimmerli Art Museum and PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Nouril will examine how artists in the Soviet Union responded to advancements in the sciences during the late Cold War period (1960s-1980s). Highlighting several key works of art from the exhibition Hot Art in a Cold War: Intersections of Art and Science in the Soviet Era, Nouril will show how artists working in the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia were both directly and indirectly inspired by science, math, engineering, and design. The paintings, sculptures, photographs, and drawings they produced make prescient proposals that are still applicable to our world today. Reception at 6:30 pm; talk 7:00 – 8:00 pm. Admission in advance: Free for Bruce members and students (with valid ID), $15 for nonmembers. At the door: $10 members, $25 nonmembers. Reservations at brucemuseum.org/site/events.

Sunday, March 11, 1:00 – 3:00 pm.
Science Sunday: Moon Rover Models
A drop-in program designed for children ages 4 and up and their families. Participants will explore simple science concepts and subjects while partaking in fun, kid-friendly experiments, projects and crafts inspired by the Museum’s collections and exhibitions. Free with admission; no advance registration is required.

Wednesday, March 14, 10:30 – 11:30 am. Film.
In Search of a Lost Paradise. (52 minutes, Russian with English subtitles).
This award-winning documentary recounts the story of Russian artist Valentina Kropivnitskaya and her husband Oskar Rabin, who, in 1974, organized a prohibited open-air art exhibition that was destroyed using KGB bulldozers. The film highlights the struggle of living under a totalitarian regime while attempting to retain personal and artistic freedoms Advance reservations required at brucemuseum.org/site/events: Free for Bruce members, $10 for non-members (includes Museum admission).

30 JANUARY – 24 FEBRUARY 2018
Painting is a magical art, it is the fire set alight by the final rays in the windows of a rich dwelling as in those of a humble hovel, it is the long mark, the humid [damp] mark, the fluent and still mark etched on the hot sand by a dying wave…

Following the success of Reading de Chirico at Tornabuoni Art London – the first exhibition ever to present the artist’s paintings alongside his writings – Tornabuoni brings this unprecedented show their Paris gallery for one month only.

The paintings of Giorgio de Chirico are among the most iconic and influential of Italian 20th-century art. He was a forerunner of the Surrealist movement and the Scuola Metafisica. However, few know about the artist’s prolific literary legacy. This exhibition — eight years after de Chirico’s first retrospective in France at the Centre Pompidou — will show over 25 works spanning the artist’s entire career, alongside original manuscripts that offer unique insight into the pictorial world of Giorgio de Chirico.

This exhibition includes de Chirico’s art criticism, poems, prose and love letters, enabling visitors to find a new reading of de Chirico’s famous works through his own words. The show also sheds light on the artist’s unusual artistic career, which began with the more radical and much admired metaphysical period and evolved into a more “baroque”, painterly style.

Following the Reading de Chirico exhibition at Tornabuoni Art London, which was curated by Katherine Robinson, member of the scientific committee of the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation in Rome, the Paris show also represents the different themes explored by the artist throughout his career: Italian Piazzas, Horses and Horsemen, Portraits, Still Lifes, Mythologies and Mannequins.

Highlights of the exhibition include the early metaphysical painting La grande tour (The great tower) from 1915 and a Nude from 1930, which Tornabuoni is proud to announce has recently been identified as a portrait of de Chirico’s lover Cornelia. These key works will be exhibited alongside writings in de Chirico’s own hand, including excerpts from Hebdomeros, a novel written by the artist in 1929 that reveals much of his creative universe.

Reading de Chirico at Tornabuoni Art Paris is accompanied by an original scholarly catalogue, edited by Katherine Robinson with texts by Dr. Gavin Parkinson, Senior Lecturer in 20th-century European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and an expert in Surrealism. This publication includes a selection of the artist’s writings (1919-1945).

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Giorgio de Chirico (Volòs, 1888 – Rome, 1978)

Born in Volos, Greece, in 1888 of Italian parents, Giorgio de Chirico was encouraged to pursue drawing and painting from an early age. After studying at the Polytechnic school of Athens, de Chirico attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1906 to 1909. He painted his first metaphysical work The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon in Florence in 1910. He exhibited for the first time in Paris in 1912 and met poet Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume, his first art dealer. In Ferrara, during the First World War, he developed the Metaphysical Interior theme and met artists Carlo Carrà and Filippo de Pisis. His canvases proved popular with many Surrealist artists – their eerie silence and dream-like quality resonating with the artistic ambitions of the Surrealists.

In the early 1920s, de Chirico focused his interest on painting technique and the Old Masters in Rome. He wrote numerous articles for art publications such Valori Plastici.

De Chirico attracted criticism from the avant-garde art world as he adopted more a more traditional style and technique, painting mythological subjects and landscapes. He returned to Paris in 1925, where he developed themes such as the Archaeologists and the Gladiators. His change of style led the Surrealists to renounce him definitively.

ABOUT TORNABUONI ART
Founded in Florence in 1981 by Roberto Casamonti, in the street that gave the gallery its name, Tornabuoni opened other exhibition spaces in Crans-Montana in 1993, Milan in 1995, Forte Dei Marmi in 2004, Paris in 2009 and London in 2015.

Specialising in Post-War Italian art, the gallery presents the work of artists such as Fontana, Burri, Castellani, Bonalumi, Boetti, Scheggi and Manzoni. Tornabuoni Art also has a permanent collection of significant works by major modern Italian artists, such as de Chirico, Morandi, Balla and Severini, as well as international 20th-century avant-garde masters, such as Picasso, Mirò, Kandinsky, Hartung, Poliakoff, Dubuffet, Lam, Matta, Christo, Wesselmann, Warhol and Basquiat. Complementing its focus on post-war and 20th-century art, the Tornabuoni Art collection also features the work of young contemporary artists such as the Italian artist Francesca Pasquali and the Italy-based Armenian artist Mikayel Ohanjanyan, who, along with the Armenian pavilion, won the Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Tornabuoni Art participates in major international art fairs such as the FIAC in Paris, TEFAF in Maastricht and New York, Art Basel, Art Basel Miami, Art Basel Hong Kong, Miart in Milan, Frieze Masters in London, Artgeneve in Geneva and Artmonte-carlo in Monaco.

The gallery also works closely with museums, artists’ estates and institutions, most recently with the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice on the exhibition ‘Alighiero Boetti: Minimum/Maximum’, timed to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale 2017. With Tornabuoni Art’s experience and knowledge of the work of the artists it represents, the gallery has also established itself as an advisor for both private and public collections.

This exhibition was made possible with a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant from Art Fund. Supported by Czech Centre London, with additional support from the Virginia Woolf Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Members and Tate St Ives Members

This exhibition of work by over 80 artists from the past 160 years takes inspiration from the work of British modernist writer Virginia Woolf. Including works by British and international artists ranging from 1854 to contemporary commissions, the selection of paintings, sculptures, photographs, text works and films evoke the recurring themes in Woolf’s writing.
The exhibition is loosely structured in two parts, looking at feminist perspectives on, and approaches to: landscape, exteriority and public life; and domesticity, the home and interiority. Woolf’s relationship to feminism, women’s creativity, domesticity and landscape was bound up with her idea to revolutionise the languages of biography and history and to find new forms for representing women’s creative lives and histories – both in the home and in the public domain.
The first section of the exhibition explores ideas around landscape, nature and its representation. Works include the South West landscapes of Laura Knight, Gluck, Frances Hodgkins, Winfred Nicholson and Dora Carrington as well as pieces by Nancy Holt, Louise Bourgeois, Mária Bartuszová and Patricia Johanson. Alongside this are paintings, photographs and sculptures that consider the performance of identity and gender in public, by artists such as Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Birgit Jürgenssen, Linder, Gwen John, Alina Szapocnikow, Eileen Agar, France-Lise McGurn, Penny Goring, Zanele Muholi, Hannah Black and Clare Atwood, who present portraits and self-portraits of known or unknown individuals.
The second part of the exhibition considers the genre of the still life and looks at the home – or ‘room of one’s own’ as a contested site for both creative freedom and social isolation. Here works by Vanessa Bell, Margaret Mellis, Marion Dorn, Enid Marx, Anna Atkins, Shana Lutker, Sara Barker, Nicola L, Caragh Thuring and Eve Fowler, will be shown alongside artists who are interested in the sub-conscious, intimacy and the psyche, such as Ithell Colquhoun, Georgiana Houghton, Joan Mitchell, Toyen, Agnes Martin, Sandra Blow, Emmy Bridgwater, Grace Palithorpe, Penny Slinger, Lucy Stein and Issy Wood.
Virginia Woolf spent her childhood summers in St Ives, Cornwall and returned as an adult, taking inspiration from the town to create her celebrated novel To the Lighthouse – the namesake for which is visible from Tate St Ives. This major exhibition has been organised by Tate St Ives in association with Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Future Life Handbook. We would all like to have one of these – a guide on how to keep going in troubling times. As information moves faster and faster, in our race to keep up with it, we are often too busy with the now to look to the future. As the struggle continues between preserving history and rewriting it to fit a new script, it is also becoming ever harder to tell the difference between real and fake news. And, if both our past and our present are continuously reimagined, how are we to forecast our futures? Universal to all of us living in these mediated times, the ubiquity of such issues brings us much closer together. Artists ‘speaking’ through the autonomous voices of visual languages, translate the world to us in different, unbounded ways. This exhibition brings together the work of six young artists and two curators from China and Berlin. It is designed as a dialogue, as an exchange and elaboration of different perspectives that reflect upon our current moment through a study of the past and a view towards the future.

Berlin: a city of only 3.5 million people has become known internationally as the ‘Art Capital of Europe.’ For almost 30 years it has attracted artists from around the world who, feeding on and into its creative energy, have made it their adoptive home. Berlin is a city where everyone always seems to be from elsewhere; it is still rebuilding and repopulating itself 70 years after the disaster of World War II; it seems to be a place perpetually atoning for its painful and violent history and it is now re-inventing itself through culture.
Guangzhou: a city with a population of over 14 million in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, has historically been a fount of new and radical ideas about art and culture as well as China’s southern gateway to the rest of the world. As it has developed over the past 40 years it has become not only an economic and cultural powerhouse emblematic of change in China but also has turned its face again outwards.
In bringing to RMCA three young Berlin-based artists from different countries with three Chinese artists we are again opening that gateway to let the voices of today’s generation speak about the issues common to our experience, despite the diversity of our backgrounds.

The Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (RMCA) is a private, non-profit Contemporary Art Museum that initiates and organizes exhibitions of art, architecture, design, film, photography and video from both China and overseas. With a growing collection of contemporary art, it also promotes academic research, organizes artists’ residencies and public programs for schools, universities and adult education, and facilitates exchanges of art, artists and exhibitions internationally.

RMCA is comprised of a group of buildings located at the heart of the Guangzhou Redtory Art and Design Factory District. This former industrial area, situated by the Zhujiang River in the centre of the city, has been repurposed for cultural and leisure use and covers 170,000 square metres with over 100 different structures.

Made up of factories, sheds, offices and warehouses designed by Russian architects at the beginning of the 1950s, the planning, architecture and still extant machinery expresses the industrial idealism of the 20th century. The outer surface of the main museum building (Hall 1) has since been clad in rough corten steel to emphasise its monumentality and historical significance.

The exhibition spaces of RMCA cover a total area of over 4,000 m2 spread across six separate buildings. Halls 1 & 2 are over seven meters high, while the other spaces are more intimate. A workshop space for the Young Artists Programme has just been converted to supplement this. These resources give flexibility for planning many different kinds of exhibitions, performances and events.
It is only since the end of the 1970s that contemporary art has become established in China. First, in the mid-1980s, it was characterized by ‘The New Wave’ then, in the 1990s and after, by ‘New Cynicism’ and ‘Experimental Art,’ but the challenges facing art today demand a radically different approach.

Global flows of capital, and the burgeoning of transnational networks and social media have brought together, and transformed, art’s cultural and political context. A new generation of artists in China, and elsewhere, is facing, and digesting, the effects of this transformation.

This has made an impact on how art is made and thought about. Increasingly, art works adopt the form and discipline of archives as they confront memory and the past from different contemporary points of view, and even the conventions and boundaries of the art exhibition itself are gradually being eroded as art and life interpenetrate in new, unexpected ways.

For the art of today, museums take on the role more of workshops or laboratories as the concerns of artists, curators, designers, architects, intellectuals and the public begin to converge. The aim of the RMCA Young Artists Programme is to provide through exhibitions, residencies and its public activities an ever-broadening platform for this process to take place.